GoDaddy Goes Offline Due to Router Errors

Domain and hosting vendor denies claims that it was the victim of attack.

GoDaddy, one of the world's largest hosting and domain name providers, had a major outage on Monday. The outage lasted nearly six hours for some customers, taking domains, sites and email offline for thousands of users.

A hacker who claims to be associated with hactivist group anonymous jumped on the outage, claiming that the GoDaddy shutdown was a the result of a deliberate Denial of Service (DoS) attack against the company.

GoDaddy has refuted that claim and offered it's own explanation as to what triggered the outage.

"The service outage was not caused by external influences," Scott Wagner, interim CEO of GoDaddy, said in a statement. "It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS)."

According to Wagner, GoDaddy experienced intermittent service outages from 10 AM PDT until approximately 4 PM PDT. Wagner stressed that the six hour service disruption did not put customer data at risk.

While the GoDaddy outage was not the result of a malicious act, Wagner placed the blame on his company's routers.

"We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables," Wagner said. "Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com."

This isn't the first time that a major internet service has gone down, with hackers claiming responsibility and the vendor denying the claim. In June, Twitter was taken offline for a hours. Hackers then claimed responsibility but Twitter denied it not that the outage was due to a 'cascaded bug' in one of its infrastructure components.

In GoDaddy's case the router data flaw is likely related to the company's overall DNS infrastructure.

"Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure," Wagner said. " This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves. We have let our customers down and we know it."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eSecurityPlanet and InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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